Damien Hirst Bone China Plate

Beautiful, amore, gasp, eyes going into the top of the head and fluttering painting

Growing up in Auckland, unlike my cousins who grew up in the Waikato we didn’t have an A&P show, what us city kids did have was the Royal Easter Show, held at the usually muddy show grounds in Greenlane.

Every year my parents would take myself and my younger brother, it was always in the evening which made it special being out past our curfew which was 8pm for a 10 year old. For me the ghost train always scared the crap out of me, I would always demolish my toffee apple before my younger brother then pester him for his, we both loved the shooting alley-can’t ever remember wining anything. The last attraction my brother and I would visit before heading home was the splatter painting tent (that’s what we called it), where you attached your piece of cardboard to a potter’s wheel which then spun at least 100 times faster, while the wheel spun you would squirt different colour paint to create a picture. These memories always flood back every time I l see Damien Hirst’s ‘Beautiful, amore, gasp’ plate.